Red Panda Simulation and Modeling Process

This hair groom was created in Houdini. The renderer used is Redshift. The animation was attached to my red panda model from Mixamo.

Though offered a bear model to groom I wanted to create my own. I had a hard time choosing between making a kermit, possum, racoon, skunk, or red panda, and created reference boards for each animal. In the end, I chose to create a red panda as in middle school someone said that I reminded them of one.

To connect with my modeling roots I had decided to create this model inside of Maya. My red panda started off as a few connected and rounded boxes:

My classmate, Jerilyn Tennison's Unikitty and my professor, Timothy Steele's Bear, were used as references for my Red Panda model as I refined my panda's shape and topology.

When nearing completion, I would update my Red Panda model/skin onto Mixamo to check for topological issues and making sure that deformations were smooth.

Once it was time to pull the red panda into Houdini, I imported it into Houdini and created groups for important geometry pieces (Such as head, tail, or ears) to create different types of fur for different sections of the body. Hair grooms happen at top obj level and the groups on which you want fur generated had to be selected in the top-level guide groom node settings.

I had an issue with the points and faces in the t-pose .obj topology not matching with the animated .abc topology. I circumvented this by importing the unmoving t-pose as a .abc as well.

This is the texture map that I used for my red panda. I UV'd them myself.

The fall simulation: